Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

Plunder has matured into habit and addiction; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plu...

The fact of history is that black people have not -- probably no people have ever -- liberated themselves strictly through their own efforts. In every great change in the lives of African Americans we...

Once we were slaves to haramu-fal. Once we were breed by men solely to give our bodies to other men. We have seen how the woman becomes the enslaved. Let us now show them how the enslaved becomes a le...

Each time a police officer engages us, death, injury, maiming is possible. It is not enough to say that this is true of anyone or more true of criminals. The moment the officers began their pursuit of...

This is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to smile. No one told those little white children, with their tricycles, to be twice as good. I imagined their parents telling them t...

What both visions share is a sense that black culture in its present form is bastardized and pathological. What they also share is a foundation in myth. Black people are not the descendants of kings....

You can’t refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of your position, he said. The value of social movements and activism is to get you at the table, get you in the room, and then start...

I do not think your problem is an old philosopher. I do not think your problem is the renegade Dora Milaje. Your problem, T'Challa... is the people.

The Negro Family is a flawed work in part because it is a fundamentally sexist document that promotes the importance not just of family but of patriarchy, arguing that black men should be empowered at...

Race itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem.

The thing is, a black man can’t be president in America, given the racial aversion and history that’s still out there, Cornell Belcher, a pollster for Obama, told the journalist Gwen Ifill after the 2...

These were notes on how to write, and thus notes on how to think.

I am so very proud of you — your openness, your ambition, your aggression, your intelligence. My job, in the little time we have left together, is to match that intelligence with wisdom. Part of that...

To survive the neighborhoods and shield my body, I learned another language consisting of a basic complement of head nods and handshakes. I memorized a list of prohibited blocks.

Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy—in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America’s r...

But Donald Trump arrived in the wake of something more potent—an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care, nigger climate accords, nigger justice reform that could be targeted for destruction,...

The black people in these films seemed to love the worst things in life—love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the fire-hoses that tore off their clothe...

I think of your grandmother calling me and noting how you were growing tall and would one day try to test me. And I said to her that I would regard that day, should it come, as the total failure of fa...

Obama’s greatest misstep was born directly out of his greatest insight. Only Obama, a black man who emerged from the best of white America, and thus could sincerely trust white America, could be so ce...

We are warriors. And yet a moment ago, you were women. Mother, I swear it, I am doing all I can. And I am sorry, daughter, but you are going to have to do more.